If you want to start your own food-based business in Baltimore, it’s fairly easy to do. The city allows certain bakers and chefs to get licenses to sell products made in their own home kitchens.
It’s scaling up your operation to meet a growing demand that’s the tricky part.
Bottoms Up Bagels co-founder Joan Kanner and Michelle Bond shared their experiences trying to expand their food-based business with students at this week’s Entrepreneurship Unplugged.
Bond and Kanner started their bagel company last year to bring a taste of their native New Jersey to Baltimore. They launched their operation out of their home kitchen, boiling and baking bagels using their tiny stove top and oven. But as their customer base grew, they outgrew their small kitchen and struggled to find a central place where they could make their product.
“I would literally be in the middle of making ten batches of bagels and have to stop what I was doing because we had no more cold storage in the place where I was making them,” Bond said. “So I’d put them in the car and drive them three miles to the next place we were renting space.”
Their salvation came in September with the launch of B-More Kitchen, Baltimore’s first food business incubator and accelerator. Located on York Road in northern Baltimore, the facility provides members with 24-hour access to commercial-grade kitchen facilities, cold storage and more. Members also can take advantage of workshops, ranging from accounting for small businesses to marketing and more.
B-More Kitchen founder Jonathan Fishman saw the need for a place in Baltimore to support new and small food-based businesses. The lack of kitchen space for small businesses to work out of in Baltimore, was a “barrier to scaling up or selling your products’ on a larger scale,” said Fishman, who also spoke at Tuesday’s Entrepreneurship Unplugged event.
“Stores like Walmart and Costco are making space on their shelves for things that are local, and that is actually the fastest growing sector of the food market, and it’s expected to be huge by the end of this decade,” he said.
Bottoms Up Bagels was one of the first members of B-More Kitchen. Now, the incubator is where they prep, bake and store all of their cold products, allowing Bond and Kanner more time to work on expanding their business.
With both ventures being less than one year old, Bottoms Up Bagels and B-More Kitchen hope to flourish alongside each other and grow quickly throughout the next couple of years, all while providing quality products for the hungry public.
The next Entrepreneurship Unplugged event will be held Tuesday, Feb. 21 at noon at the West Village Commons room 305. The guest speakers will be Frank DeSantis from Stanley Black & Decker talking about “intrapreneurship” and innovation at a Fortune 500 company.
See the full lineup of spring 2017 speakers here.